,
while Spenser was still delving over the _propria que maribus_, and
Raleigh launching paper navies, Shakspeare was stretching his baby
hands for the moon, and the little Bacon, chewing on his coral, had
discovered that impenetrability was one quality of matter. It almost
takes one's breath away to think that "Hamlet" and the "Novum Organon"
were at the risk of teething and measles at the same time. But Ben was
right also in thinking that eloquence had grown backwards. He lived
long enough to see the language of verse become in a measure
traditionary and conventional. It was becoming so, partly from the
necessary order of events, partly because the most natural and intense
expression of feeling had been in so many ways satisfied and
exhausted,--but chiefly because there was no man left to whom, as to
Shakspeare, perfect conception gave perfection of phrase. Dante, among
modern poets, his only rival in condensed force, says, "Optimis
conceptionibus optima loquela conveniet; sed optimae conceptiones non
possunt esse nisi ubi scientia et ingenium est;... et sic non omnibus
versificantibus optima loquela convenit, cum plerique sine scientia et
ingenio versificantur."[9]

Shakspeare must have been quite as well aware of the provincialism of
English as Bacon was; but he knew that great poetry, being universal in
its appeal to human nature, can make any language classic, and that the
men whose appreciation is immortality will mine through any dialect to
get at an original soul. He had as much confidence in his homebred
speech as Bacon had want of it, and exclaims,--

"Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme."

He must have been perfectly conscious of his genius, and of the great
trust which he imposed upon his native tongue as embodier and
perpetuator of it. As he has avoided obscurities in his sonnets, he
would do so _a fortiori_ in his plays, both for the purpose of
immediate effect on the stage and of future appreciation. Clear
thinking makes clear writing, and he who has shown himself so eminently
capable of it in one case is not to be supposed to abdicate
intentionally in others. The difficult passages in the plays, then, are
to be regarded either as corruptions, or else as phenomena in the
natural history of Imagination, whose study will enable us to arrive at
a clearer theory and better understanding of it.

While we believe that our language had two periods of culminat